Inkjet printing is well suited to the SOHO (small office, home office) printer market. Increasingly, inkjet printing is expanding into other markets, such as label and wideformat printing. High-speed web printing is becoming a significant commercial sector for the inkjet printing market. High-speed inkjet web printing is especially competitive with traditional offset printing presses over relatively short print runs, because digital printing does not require the initial set-up time and cost of preparing offset printing plates. In a digital inkjet web printer, it is possible to print, for example, thousands of labels on-demand.
Hitherto, the present Assignee has described a number of inkjet web printers employing Memjet® pagewidth printing technology. Memjet® pagewidth printers employ one or more fixed printhead(s) while print media, such as a media web, are fed continuously past the printhead(s). This arrangement vastly increases print speeds compared to traditional scanning printhead technologies.
US 2011/0279530 (the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference) describes a benchtop web printer suitable for printing labels. The benchtop printer includes a single multi-color pagewidth printhead, an integrated web feed mechanism and a maintenance station. The maintenance station comprises individual liftable modules which cross the media feed path in order to perform printhead maintenance. A disadvantage of this arrangement is that a media web must be broken in order to perform printhead maintenance. This maintenance regime therefore places limitations on the types and lengths of print jobs that may be performed.
US 2012/0092419 (the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference) describes an industrial web printer comprised of a plurality of monochrome pagewidth printheads aligned with each other in a media feed direction. The printheads are mounted on a common housing connected to a scissor lift mechanism. The scissor lift mechanism enables the printheads to be lifted and lowered relative to the media web. In order to perform printhead maintenance, the printheads are lifted, a maintenance assembly is slid laterally underneath the printheads and the printheads lowered onto the maintenance assembly. In this way, printhead maintenance may be performed without breaking the media web. However, a disadvantage of the printer described in US 2012/0092419 is its relatively high cost as well as difficulties in scaling the printer for printing onto wider media widths.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,485,656 (the contents of which are herein incorporated by reference) describes a wide format printer comprising a plurality of staggered overlapping printheads. Each printhead is maintained by a respective rotatable maintenance carousel positioned opposite its respective printhead. Each carousel crosses the media path in order to perform printhead maintenance, which necessitates breaking the media web.
It would be desirable to provide a relatively low-cost, high-speed inkjet web printer, which does not require breaking the media web in order to perform printhead maintenance. It would further be desirable to provide an inkjet web printer, which is readily scalable to wider media widths (e.g. widths greater than about 210 mm). It would further be desirable to provide a high-speed inkjet web printer, which is amenable to retrofitting into existing web feed arrangements, such as those used in offset printing presses. Such a retrofitted printer is an attractive proposition for commercial printing presses having a number of offset printing lines and, moreover, promotes uptake of digital web printing at a relatively low cost.